This book has been written keeping in mind the need for a comprehensive and reliable introductory manual to bioinformatics. This field touches all areas of biology, with application to genome analysis, protein structure, prediction, target identification, drug designing, metabolomics and systems biology. It is of central importance in the genomic and post genomic age because of the vast amounts of information that are becoming available from different disciplines, for example - sequencing of human, bacterial, rice genomes have unraveled a plethora of information which can be put to best use by using this technology, in fields ranging from medicine to agricultural biotechnology. Taking into consideration such questions as what is bioinformatics, computational biology, what are the components of bioinformatics, genomics and proteomics, the goals, tools and prospects of this field, the book is a comprehensive manual on the subject.
